Robust Attitude Stabilization of Rigid Bodies Based on Control Lyapunov Function: Experimental Verification on a Quadrotor Testbed

The robust stabilization of the attitude of quadrotors with respect to disturbance torques is a fundamental and crucial control problem in many unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications. For this problem, a control Lyapunov function (CLF)-based robust adaptive control was previously proposed by the authors, and its effectiveness was confirmed through numerical simulations. In this article, we tackle the experimental verification of this controller. We first construct a quadrotor testbed equipped with the self-developed flight controller. Then, we implement the proposed robust adaptive controller and perform flight experiments. According to the results of comparative experiments using a PID-type controller and a non-robust controller, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.